Mayor Scott’s $3 billion housing plan is picking Baltimore’s winning blocks and leaving the rest to rot.
I run the math at eleven at night the way I have run it since March 2022. The mortgage rate David and I locked in is 7%, which is the rate that made every Philly millennial I know stop looking. The rate sits on top of a price no longer what a household income supports. Pew has been measuring this since before some of my friends’ kids could vote, and the line keeps going the same direction. The Urban Institute’s American Affordability Tracker puts it in fewer words than I can: since 2017, average earnings are up 43%; home sale prices, 81%; rents, 54%; the cheapest ACA Silver plan, 77%. Half of all U.S. renters — 22.4 million households — are now cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of income for shelter, and 12.1 million of them are paying more than half. JCHS, 2022.
So I read the Wall Street Journal’s bidding-wars piece on Baltimore and recognized my own kitchen from across the country. The numbers from one side of the recovery are clean. Mayor Brandon Scott has committed $3 billion to eliminate vacancy by 2038. Vacancies are down from a long-stagnant 16,000 to under 12,000. In Johnston Square, near Johns Hopkins Hospital and three transit lines, the empties have halved since the days of “rows and rows of boarded-up houses.” ReBUILD Metro did the heaviest lifting. “Johnston Square is at the perfect location,” buyer Alex Kovach told the paper. The whole-blocks model — nonprofit developers rehabilitating entire blocks at once — works there because the anchor institution makes the renovated shell worth the gamble. A plumber-turned-investor named Chris Waldron paid $45,000 at auction for a rowhouse, plans to put $130,000 and five months into it, and will sell it for more than $300,000. That is a real checkbook, real demand, real reconnection.
The numbers from the other side are buried two pages in. Carrollton Ridge, in southwest Baltimore, historically one of the city’s highest-homicide neighborhoods, still holds about 750 vacant homes — 40 more than a decade ago, while the city’s count fell by roughly four thousand. Community leader Derwin Hannah told the paper the obvious: “It’s not getting any investment when it comes to vacant housing. You’re looking at a community with nothing.” The photographs that go with it show collapsed and fire-scarred shells, trees growing through roofs, red diamonds marking structures beyond repair, and an open-air drug market in the afternoon. None of that fits on a spreadsheet of 12,000.
This is not the unintended downside of the strategy. It is the strategy. The whole-blocks model works precisely because blocks near an anchor institution hold the value that makes a renovated shell worth the gamble. So the $3 billion reads the city as a map of neighborhoods by distance from a viable address. Mayor Scott calls vacant housing a problem of perception: “When people see a bunch of vacants, no one wants to live there.” Perception is what the subsidy can fix. A block with an anchor and a plan sells itself; a block with neither does not. That is not a failure of execution. It is the plan.
The recovery is also the demand side of someone else’s housing crisis. Baltimore’s median price sits at $235,333 against $381,333 nationally, and that gap has drawn buyers from D.C. and its suburbs and from cities farther west. A Los Angeles buyer named Alex Queen came home to Baltimore after losing bidding war after bidding war in California and bought a Parity Homes rehab. She is a Baltimorean who came home — the best case this recovery has. The auction crowd is not mostly homecomings; it is the out-of-state money the price gap invited. The same national housing shortage the White House economists pegged at roughly 10 million homes is what shows up in Baltimore ready to buy at the cheap end of the auction. The recovery in one place is the evacuation from another.
The winnings from that spillover are not split evenly. The owner of a rising block collects the equity; the renter on the same block collects the rent increase. That is the renter-owner wealth gap at its widest in nearly four decades — the same nationwide number, made locally visible in every block where the renovations land. The family that stayed for four decades in a recovered neighborhood does not own the recovery; it pays for it. The investor who arrived last quarter does. The plan calls it renewal. The math calls it transfer.
The plan is beginning to spook itself. Bree Jones, founder of Parity Homes, told the paper that speculators are now “swooping in” to buy shells cheap and wait for the values to rise. Last year, New York real-estate investors were alleged to have committed fraud in acquiring hundreds of Baltimore vacant properties through an arrangement that left many of the loans in default and blocks sliding back toward foreclosure. That is not an exception to the model. It is the model wearing a different suit: buy the city’s cheap potential, hold it, and wait for the whole-block math to do the appreciation for you. The plan built the beacon. The speculators are following it home.
A bid on a Baltimore rowhouse is a bid a younger household lost in D.C., where the income needed to afford the median mortgage payment now runs to six figures and most renters never get there. The bidding war here is the same eviction I am afraid of, just relocated.
Taylor Swift wrote “the last great american dynasty” about a woman who came into a house, made it eccentric, and got called irresponsible by the press anyway. The point of the song is not the woman. The point is that the press applies the word irresponsible to eccentricity when the inheritance is small, and the word flair when the inheritance is large. The vacant houses in Johnston Square, the rowhouses in Fishtown that David and I scraped together estate help to afford, the $45,000 shell Waldron won at auction to flip for $300,000-plus — the difference between these transactions is not effort. The difference is inheritance. The money behind the auction was earned in markets that exported the people who earned it: San Francisco, where the bidding has priced a generation out, sent them to Baltimore instead. Some of us had grandparents who died in a real-estate market. Some had grandparents who died during a different economy. Some did not have grandparents who owned houses, full stop, and that is a sentence that is not about real estate.
Anne Helen Petersen, in Can’t Even, named the diagnosis I have been trying to say since I sat at this kitchen table in March 2022. We “fully conceptualized ourselves as walking college resumes.” We read every Wall Street Journal article about migration patterns and interest rates and built our self-understanding on the assumption that the resume would keep working. The buyers bidding on Baltimore’s vacant houses have resumes. Some of them are excellent. What they do not have is a city that pays what they were told the resume was worth. They bought in Baltimore because they had to. Their attendance at the auction is the same eviction I am afraid of, just relocated.
Pamela Druckerman, in Bringing Up Bébé, wrote about the assumption baked into French family policy — generous state-paid leave, subsidized crèches, free maternelle at three, real school meals — that public provision of care is the floor that lets everything else happen. The U.S. assumption baked into Baltimore’s whole-blocks plan is that the private provision of demand from buyers fleeing failed markets is the floor that lets the renovation happen. The first is a public investment in children. The second is a public investment in housing from people whose children could not afford to live in the cities where they earned the income to bid.
What I have, and a 30-year-old Baltimorean with a good resume does not, is the estate distribution from David’s grandmother that closed the gap on the Fishtown down payment. That was inheritance. That is what the bidding war in Baltimore lacks in every transaction where the buyer is from somewhere else. The figures I keep going back to: a 7% mortgage; a 41% middle-income renter cost-burden share; 12.1 million renters paying more than half their income for shelter; $381,333 for the median home that 80% of the income distribution cannot underwrite; the $3 billion in Baltimore committed to make a market function for buyers who already had one.
The image that stays with me is the one inside Waldron’s auction purchase: kitchen equipment, furniture, clothes, a family picture on the floor, wooden planks with nails pointing up. Someone’s family lived there. Someone’s family left, or was pushed out. The plan’s success on the winning blocks is being measured in the same rowhouse the family used to own. Mayor Scott’s whole-blocks plan is a national housing-availability problem wearing a Baltimore costume; the cure lives somewhere else, in the federally financed housing finance that built the country my parents bought into, before maintaining it became optional, before the demand it once absorbed spilled into cities never built for it. Until that comes back, Baltimore’s vacant houses will keep being bought by people who had to leave some other city to afford them — and the Baltimoreans who could have bought them will be writing the next bidding war in some cheaper city that the next crisis produces. Until the family in the picture has somewhere to come back to that is not the next investor’s flip, the $3 billion is not buying the city. It is buying the part of the city someone else’s housing crisis is willing to pay for.